If you're over 30 but have not read this book, you've probably heard of it, so when I saw it on a market stall at a very reasonable £2.50 just prior to going away for a week, I thought it would make an ideal holiday read.
The basic premise concerns the author, a successful New York therapist, who, after years of living a "normal" indulgent suburban life and becoming bored shitless with it (we've all been there), decides to do something about it. He invents dice theory, where eventually all ones life choices are determined by the shake of one or more dice, the ostensible aim being to destroy the self, or ego.
Live your life at random by rule of the die - sounds mad but worth a try until you realise that the choices presented to our by now thoroughly unlikable hero are all his own in the first place. Surely a true random experience is only to be had by taking arbitrary choices that you haven't come up with yourself in the first instance?
It's a good theory, ruined by shoddy practice combined with a level of amorality that only a self-obsessed overpaid 1970s middle class American could come up with. Indeed there is an irony in attempting to destroy the self and replacing it with an existence that is the ultimate in selfism. A good half of his choices end up in some form of coitus, which after the second or third instance becomes predictable and boring.
If you get past the first expression of dice living where the protagonist decides by dice to rape his downstairs neighbour, who also happens to be his business partner's wife (and that is only the start of an amoral slide to depravity) then good luck to you, I wish I hadn't.
Oh, one other thing, this guy, who claims to be a shrink and therefore should know what he's talking about claims that the most difficult emotion to express is self-pity. Huh? That has to be a joke surely, although it's hard to tell to be honest.
Still gets 3 out of 5 for sheer brazenness!
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